Dubspot

SALVAGE

In the first article that I wrote here for the Dubspot blog I introduced the idea of Speed Dating.  In this article, I’m going to talk about what you can do with some of the ideas that don’t make the first round of cuts, along with some of the un-finished tracks you have on your hard drive.  Often when we work on stuff we’ll get to a certain point, get stuck and start grinding our gears, spending a bunch of time fiddling with an idea that isn’t going anywhere.  This is exactly what speed dating is designed to avoid: that energy and time wasting, un-fun process, where you get so unhappy with the fact that something is not progressing that you give up.  Very often that experience of having gotten stuck and wasted several hours on an idea will create a negative feeling toward that project, so you don’t want to return to it the next day…  Better to start fresh and move on to greener pastures, with the hope that this won’t happen again.  While carried to excess this will lead to never finishing anything, in moderation this is basically a useful impulse.  The reason you got stuck on something is that it had some problem that was preventing you from progressing with it.  Putting it aside and starting something new is not a bad thing.

The flip side to that coin though is that the thing that made you sit and grind your gears on it while getting nowhere was that there was something in there you really liked.  It was that something that kept you going even as you started to realize that you were not moving forward.  The key here is training yourself to be able to recognize that inspiring element, identify any problems it may have, solve them and build it into something good.  One of my personal favorite beats that I’ve made, called Reign, which I recorded grime MC Skepta on for my Team Shadetek project’s “Pale Fire” album is an example of this.

I had previously built a 140 bpm beat using the same lead melody playing on a violin sound, with a completely different beat and bass that I had made while living in Berlin.  The lead melody was a 16 bar loop with a change after 8 bars that I really liked but for some reason I couldn’t finish the track and got stuck.  When Zack Shadetek (the other member of Team Shadetek) and I were back in New York finishing Pale Fire I had been in the studio for a few days working and had wrung myself dry for fresh ideas.  I’d made several beats that were good but wanted to keep going and didn’t feel like I was coming up with any ideas that were giving me energy to make new stuff.  Sometimes this happens, the well can run dry after a period of good work and forcing it from there rarely works for me.  I usually need something to inspire me to make something new, it could be a sound, an idea, a new tempo, another song etc.  I decided to take a look back through some of my un-finished sketches from the past few months and see if anything would spark some fresh energy.

When I found the original sketch for ‘Reign’ originally called ‘Rain’ (presumably because I’d made it on some rainy Berlin day) I remembered how much I liked the lead line but instantly saw why I’d been unable to finish it.  I had been trying too hard to make the drums interesting and ended up with a weird beat that was neither here nor there.

Finally seeing the problem clearly I quickly deleted everything except the lead melody.  I continued by adding a very simple half-step beat.  This was important because it had become clear to me that I had been trying to do too much in the track.  The melody was great and I should have just let it take center stage.  I took the main melody line and sent it to two different sounds in Reaktor (a plug-in/application by Native Instruments).  One sound with a slower attack preventing it from sounding all the notes and with a slow portamento to give it a gliding pitch-bending sound.  Inspired by the new structure I quickly created a bassline and supporting melody and then easily arranged and mixed the track.  When Skepta arrived in New York a few days later he instantly picked that beat, laid his bars and we decided to add it to the album.

In the context of speed dating what this means is that it’s a good idea to periodically rotate back through the sketches that you have done and not finished and see if you can identify ways to finish them that you didn’t think of before.  Outside of that it’s a great way to make sure that some of the unfinished ideas you have in your projects folder get a second shot at realizing their potential.  It’s also great for those situations I described where you want to work but feel that you don’t have new exciting ideas to start, whether it’s because you’ve been working for days, are hungover, tired or just not feeling creative.  You may not have new ideas but if you’ve been working for a while you definitely have some old ones, some of which might turn out to be better than you remember.

In this case what was a problem track that was sitting in the scratch pile was able to become one of my personal favorites as well as one singled out for praise in reviews of the album.  The key was that returning after a period of time allowed me to see clearly what I was doing wrong and have the perspective to solve it.  In the initial session I was still attached to the direction I had tried to go with the complicated beat and not ready to admit defeat on that part of the track.  After letting it sit for a while I came back with some distance feeling less personally married to the ideas and was able to chuck out the parts that were holding the good ideas back and finish the track.